Hey flight comparison sites, here is how Google will eat your lunch

It seems Google is accelerating its affords to climb up the value chain. My former post about this matter pointed at the eBook business where Google sources content from publishers and sells it directly to consumers, avoiding any middleman.

Now it came to my attention that Google has integrated services of the purchased ITA flight search engine to display flight schedules directly on top of its results in the US. I would agree this is a great service to look up available flights, but Google did turn it into a flight comparison sites killer. Here is how it works:

You look for a flight by searching for example “LA to NYC” in Google. The large result box cannot be overseen. It even has date options directly embedded.

Once you select a flight you will be redirected to google.com/flights where there are even more powerful filters making it easy to select a flight that fits your criteria.

The big red booking button will now catch your attention and make sure you click on one of the AdWords ads being displayed once you hit it.

My example shows how Delta is now directly receiving the user targeted at their booking site for exactly that flight previously selected on google.com via AdWords.

I guess it is obvious that this will work for Google and by purchasing ITA, the company behind most of the well known flight comparison sites like Kayak and many more, now Google has the ultimate power to make all flight comparison sites dispensable. I am worried that Google will continue to jump into more e-commerce markets and shortcut the value chain to maximise own profits. Especially in countries like Germany where Google owns the web search market with more than 90% share this sounds really evil. What is your opinion?